Sake of Sake

Almost midnight.  An old SNL rerun is playing, the one with Christopher Walken and the cow bell.  Perched on the edge, I’m at the childhood home of the woman I’m dating.  In some affluent Kentucky suburb with a flowery sounding name, we managed to find a decent sushi place. Belly full of eel and masago. Japanese beer, far off future dreams.  After Cirque de Solei, Julie and I stopped at a hipster joint that sells overpriced margaritas.  We kissed in the rain, amber autumn glow of fading evening light making her beautiful.  Two times, I was close to saying it.   

“So I was telling my brother about you,” Corrinne begins in her Tennessee drawl, “how you speak another language, and he wondered how.  What school was it again?”  We’ve been over this.  Julie’s mom has asked me a few times about my schooling.  Tonight, she’s like a lioness, certain I’m just another hyena. 

“Did you go to college?  I mean, did you complete a degree?” She yawns.  “Maybe you’re fibbing just a bit.”   She squishes two fingers together, her mauve nail polish catching on the reflection of the flood lights. 

I stop myself from spouting something snarky, replying like Tupac did to Biggie during their feud.  This bitch.  Julie’s mama might sound sweet because she’s from the south, but she’s just a meddling woman in Ann Taylor clothes.  Sitting in front of her fake fire in her half a million dollar house, it is easy for her to judge.  I breathe in deep.  My bra feels too tight, my dress too short.  I curl my toes back and forth, slow.  She could have said anything about my fashion, career, hell, even my tattoos and I wouldn’t take it personally.  But she knows I’m finishing a graduate program.  We’ve talked about it.  Many times.  Forcing myself to remain unassuming, I mime my face mute.  Hide emotion deep in my eyes like a Bedouin burying secrets in the sand.  Julie doesn’t know how to see my secrets and Corrinne would never bother to look.

Julie is lounging on the leather sofa that stretches along the far wall of the family room.  I’ve always wondered what a family room is for.  Now I realize it’s a place where women like myself are interrogated by aging southern belles.  I swallow loudly, the taste of unfiltered sake still in my mouth.

“I started at UC,” I mumble, looking at the Persian carpet.  The patterns make swirly colors, and I don’t know if they’re moving or if I’m drunk. 

“And then?”  Corrinne falls back against the slate of the fireplace, relaxed.  Low light makes shadows dance along her face.

“And then I finished up in Iowa.”

“Iowa!  Of all places.  What’s in Iowa?”  I don’t say I completed my degrees online, my pedigree already ruined.  I’m from that side and not this.

They have an idea how I came up.  But I’ve never described the long winters, or the sound an empty corridor makes in the middle of a December day, finding a drunk passed out on cement stairs, her fingers and feet blue from the cold.  The dog farts loudly but I’m too polite to say anything.  Usually I’m proud.  Managed to complete double degrees while nursing a dying mother, working full time.  Repeatedly dropped out of high school, quit university twice.  Usually I am certain this is admirable.  Tonight, I bow in, full of shame.  This woman, this house, this expanse of wealth unnerves me. 

Over an afternoon glass of wine last week, my best friend Micah told me that Julie isn’t the one.  Pretentious, she called her.  Advantaged, she said.  Not for me is what she didn’t say.  I have a pattern, looking for women who have just a bit of grit above a polished enamel of white privilege. 

Julie sits up.  “You know, I’ve never heard you speak a block of Farsi.  Say something.”

I look around, considering.  Poetry comes to mind.   I settle on a rhyme about a tortoise and a hare.  They won’t understand the implication as I rattle off the words in sing-song.  The tortoise can never compare herself to the hare because they’re different creatures.  One is fast, the other slow, but both end up at the same finish line.  Guttural t sounds and rolling r’s has never felt so good.  My tongue is thick.

Julie yips, applauds me and then hiccups.  Corrinne looks on, nonplussed.  Three bottles of sake was more than enough, but we brought one back.  She reaches for her little glass full of milky wine.  Julie lives with her mama, pretty young thing not sure what she wants to do when she hits thirty, when she’s forced to grow up.  She’s comfortable, living an existence that’s almost real life, but not quite.  Don’t blame her; would if I could, but there has never been the time.

I want to leave.  To get in my expensive car and drive back to my lopsided flat near the university.  But the sake.  The damn sake. Can’t risk not being safe for the sake of my pride.  I fake smile and look at deep blue wall, pretending I’m somewhere else.

“So then you’ve been working in restaurants ever since?  Not using your degree?”

I can’t stop myself, and cut her off.  “Degrees.  Double majored.”  That has to stand for something!  But this is a woman from Oak Ridge.  Her family worked on the Manhattan project.  Now her daughter is working on a woman from the projects.  Not quite full circle, but comical. 

“Right,” Corrinne replies, voice dripping with condescending fervor. 

I’m boiling.  As much from Corrinne as from the realization that for all the pieces of paper I manage to earn, the growing numbers in my bank accounts, my passport stamps, I’ll always just be another kid from the ghetto trying to pass herself off as one of them.  Why the fuck do I want to be one of them in the first place?  Even I don’t understand.